Not all sounds the same
June 1, 1999
Not all sounds the same
Clients improvise, recreate, and compose
Music therapists use many different modalities to create a music experience that will promote health. However, there are four major categories of music therapy, according to Brian Abrams, MMT, MT-BC, director of music therapy at the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center in Philadelphia. These include:
• Improvisatory music therapy.
This involves creating music spontaneously without any previous structure, either alone or in a group with or without the therapist’s involvement. This can be accomplished with voice or instruments.
"The idea is that you use the improvised sound and the process of creating it to work through specific issues that the sound can represent metaphorically or that the sound has some direct impact on," explains Abrams.
For example, if a person has a headache, the improvisation might be music that feels like it is soothing the headache. Or perhaps there are family issues a person needs to resolve. In this case, the individual or group would improvise sound or music that depicts the members of the person’s family. Through this sound, the person begins to work through family issues that need to be resolved.
• Recreative music therapy.
During this therapy, the client reproduces either all or part of an existing musical model such as a song or instrumental piece. The goal here is to see how close a client can come to the existing structure. The struggles the client has in trying to play the piece is the therapeutic process. The therapist and client would look at the parts that are challenging and examine why that is so, as well as looking at the parts that are easy.
• Composition music therapy.
Composition is recording the music either in writing or on tape and creating a structure that others can recreate. This process presents many challenges and allows the client to set specific goals.
• Receptive music therapy.
With this therapy, people simply take in musical sound in some form. For example, vibro-acoustics is a field where the person feels the music and it has properties that might effect the body in certain ways or bring up certain issues.
A highly specialized form of receptive music therapy is called guided imagery in music. "It is simply taking in the sound of classical music and allowing imagery or various inner experiences to be evoked spontaneously through the music and then to explore those as a source of the therapeutic process," explains Abrams.
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